The effect of Gaussian error in object recognition

In model based recognition, the goal is to locate an instance of one or more known objects in an image. The problem is compounded in real images by the presence of clutter, occlusion, and sensor error, which can lead to "false negatives", failures to recognize the presence of the object, and "false positives", in which the algorithm incorrectly identifies an occurrence of the object. The probability of either event is affected by parameters within the recognition algorithm, which are almost always chosen in an ad-hoc fashion. The effect of the parameter values on the likelihood that the recognition algorithm will make a mistake are usually not understood explicitly. To address the problem, we explicitly model the noise that occurs in the image. In a typical recognition algorithm, hypotheses about the position of the object are tested against the evidence in the image, and an overall score is assigned to each hypothesis. We use a statistical model to determine what score a correct or incorrect hypothesis is likely to have, and use standard binary hypothesis testing techniques to distinguish correct from incorrect hypotheses. Using this approach, we can compare algorithms and noise models, and automatically choose values for internal system thresholds to minimize the probability of making a mistake.